Chapter 10: Understanding and Communicating Meaning

Overview

To be useful, the semantic information you've collected, whether it is from interviews or from existing data or data definitions, must be organized and presented. A fully expressed semantic model of anything at an enterprise level is quite complex. This chapter deals with issues in recording, organizing, and rendering a complex semantic model in a way that is understandable by humans and deployable in systems.

In Chapter 9 we showed where semantics lurk and some structured ways of uncovering them. We'll start this chapter with some techniques for capturing and cataloging the semantics. After that we'll deal with organizing and presenting the semantics.

In practice, the elicitation and representation of semantics greatly overlap. I have separated them into different chapters to focus on each.